The Plight of the Newly Tenured

For Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the “gentleman-tradesman” was an “amphibious creature,” a “land-water-thing.” I am in the similarly neither/nor (or both/and) position of the newly tenured associate professor, laboring as a tradesman with my research, teaching, and service but poised to enjoy the gentlemanlike position of a comfortable, secure income for the rest of my life.

I still want to hang out with the groovy assistant professors in my department, but at the same time I have a young child, two books already published, two research projects that will take years to complete, and a thought that I might want to be chairman -- or dean -- someday.

Most of the The Chronicle’s First Person articles detailing the lives and careers of academics cast the spotlight on those who are newly entering the profession or those who have attained stature and have some control over hiring, tenure decisions, and other personnel issues. New associate professors are often overlooked -- by their own departments as well as by academe generally. We are asked to bear much of the low-level administrative burden of the department, but we receive few rewards for our hard work.

The salary structure at my institution is, like many, geared to give competitive starting salaries to new hires. At the same time, the pittance of our annual raise is apportioned to faculty members as a percentage of their current pay: So the rich get richer, and those of us in the middle dwindle into the lower echelons of the departmental salary structure.

The way to bargain for nationally competitive salaries is to become nationally competitive: An outside offer has a way of forcing the dean to open his coffers. But the best time to look around is before tenure. To be competitive on the job market after tenure requires plunging wholeheartedly into either research or administration and thus skewing the balance among teaching, research, and service that tenure is supposed to ensure.

I came to my large Midwestern research institution a few years ago as an advanced assistant professor of English. My new university was bottom heavy, with a wealth of smart young hires, and the senior professors in the department hoped that I and two other advanced assistant hires would be locks for tenure. We could act as mentors to the very raw but talented body of beginning assistants and be in the mix to replace the current directors of graduate studies, undergraduate studies, and composition when they got tired of their jobs.

Tenure indeed has gone smoothly for me and another of the hires. (The third abandoned us after a year for greener pastures.) We have been vocal at department meetings, enjoyed the company of our junior and senior colleagues, and felt ready to plunge into the serious work of program building. Unfortunately, we have run into the major hurdle of malign indifference:

• Many of my junior colleagues wish to leave and spend all of their time working on publishing enough to make that possible. There’s nothing wrong with our Midwestern university. It’s just that the department has made many good hires, and the smartest and most ambitious ones see themselves on either the East or West coast, working in a top-20 department.

• Many of the senior colleagues who remained after the purge of an early-retirement program are more concerned with making the rest of their careers and their retirements comfortable than with the broad changes that would improve the department for graduate students and faculty members. For the senior colleagues who actually show up at department meetings and take on administrative responsibility, the great departmental good is making everyone happy. For many of my colleagues, the department is more a sentimental family than a place of work.

• Some of the associate professors who remain were the good hires of yesteryear who didn’t manage to find the jobs they once longed for. Many of them now spurn the academy in general, reserving their special contempt for the graduate students who teach our service courses (two a semester!). I’ve even heard some colleagues voice the opinion that we ought to disband the Ph.D. program, “since our students won’t get jobs anyway.” This is perhaps a defensible argument for a professor at a branch university or a liberal-arts institution, but we are the flagship public university in the state.

I recently came across a Web log entitled Almost Tenured, with the subtitle, Starting to Figure Out What Happens Next. The author of this blog -- a woman who, after an Ivy League education, has ended up teaching at a small Midwestern liberal-arts college -- divides her postings into five categories (blood ties, joining the life of the mind, landscape, schoolwork, and trying to breed), which together describe her three major goals: “Actually becoming the scholar that my department and I are currently pretending I am,” “Getting pregnant,” and “saving my family.” In the pseudonymous author Emma Jane’s life, things are simultaneously beginning, in process, and winding down. She looks forward and back, not sure what the “just now” should comprise.

The clich&eacute in academe is that once you earn tenure, you don’t know what to do next and therefore are left only with the miserable consciousness that you’re stuck in your job and life until retirement. And, in fact, I’ve seen that malaise overwhelm a number of recently tenured colleagues. But Emma Jane’s problem, my problem -- and the problem, I think, facing many other newly tenured faculty members -- is not one of having too few possibilities but too many.

Instead of a blank space, we have a cornucopia of interesting options on which to expend our personal and professional energy: a second scholarly project that could catapult us into the research elite; supervising the dissertation of a graduate student who just might be better than us; trying out administration -- for the power or the pocket change; or just taking care of teaching, reviewing a couple of books, and tending one’s own garden.

In subsequent columns I will discuss some of the challenges facing the newly tenured, including hiring new faculty members (and then serving as mentors for those new colleagues), supervising graduate students, taking on too much “service,” becoming caught up in university politics, losing touch with undergraduate teaching, pushing through with research, and generally avoiding midcareer malaise.

The temptation to spend life following auctions on eBay is always present. As we become the busy workers of the university, many of us just want to escape.